Spectra Logic Joins the LTO-8 Advance Party

by Administrator on October 11, 2017

Today, Spectra Logic announced a tape technology “pre-purchase” program that provides customers with LTO-7 tape drives and media for use until LTO-8 technology becomes available. The customer goes to the head of the line and will be the first to receive the new drives when they begin shipping.

According to the announcement from the Boulder, CO-based storage stalwart:

“LTO-8 tape technology doubles the capacity of LTO-7 to an astonishing 30 TB compressed (12TB native) per cartridge, and improves performance by 20 percent, up to 360MB/sec. The additional capacity equates to fewer tape cartridges required to store the same amount of data while the performance boost translates into the need for fewer tape drives to do the same amount of work. In addition, the new LTO-8 drives are backward compatible with LTO-7 tape media, allowing users to read/write any LTO-7 media.”

“Once available, LTO-8 tape drives and media will ship with Spectra’s entire line of tape libraries and be fully compatible with Spectra’s BlueScale® library software. When fully populated with LTO-8 drives and media, all of Spectra’s tape libraries, including its most compact, the Spectra® T50e Tape Library, will support at least one petabyte of compressed storage capacity. The Spectra TFinity® ExaScale® Tape Library configured with LTO-8 will deliver 58PB of compressed storage capacity in a three-frame footprint and up to 1.6EB of compressed storage capacity in Spectra’s largest configuration of 44 frames. In addition, LTO-8 tape technology will support LTFS, WORM and AES 256-bit hardware encryption.”

We are delighted to see the swirl of interest around tape technology and we liked an infographic that Spectra created in time for its announcement. Here is a copy in PDF format.

Alternatively, you can DOWNLOAD infographic directly from the company website and REGISTER for a free webinar to be held on 2 November while you are there.

Thanks, Spectra Logic, for sharing the news with us.

NOTE: At Spectra Logic’s request, the background tape library in the Mona Lisa pic above has been changed from a Quantum Scalar to a Spectra Logic T-Finity frame. Thanks, Leigh G., for pointing out the dissonance that may have been caused by the image.